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the reason Christians weren't allowed to lend for interest had nothing to do with fear of economic activity, and plenty to do with legislating morality. It was considered wrong to practice usury, and it was thus made illegal. Yet another example that legislating morals is dumb.

This link tells how to disable the service on various Windows platforms.

I said: "I have no doubt the "review" was written with a sense of humour, but it wasn't just a joke." PhoenixFlare responded: "Then he failed, miserably. The "joke" isn't funny at all, and frankly, makes him look like a complete idiot."

Note that I actually said it wasn't just a joke. As to whether it was funny or not, well, different people find humour in all sorts of different things. You might (or might not) have found parts of it funny if you hadn't misunderstood it on your first reading. Now, of course, it's very unlikely you'll find it at all funny because it'll be tainted by the memory of the irritation and/or annoyance you felt on reading it the first time.

PhoenixFlare: "If that really was his intention, which I doubt....Then why the hell try to pass it off as a "real" article?" Well, one might as well ask why people participate in April Fools stunts. And by the way, remember that this is Slashdot, the land where no errors of spelling or grammar - let alone complete misrepresentation of a story - are sufficient to keep an article from the front page *wry grin*.

But sometimes it's necessary to present something as the "real thing" in order to make the point you're trying to make. Have a look at the very ingenious essay A Person Paper on Purity in Language for one very good example of this sort of thing. And yes, there were apparently a lot of people that misunderstood (and continue to misunderstand) that essay... but if you don't misunderstand it, it makes the point very effectively. :)

Pete.

From this, came (1) an acceptance of slavery, thus justifying the New England abuses of the Industrialization. That, in turn, drove a desire of the New England Industrialists to seize the South for their benefit, as well as providing a pretext for the ci vil war.

The ongoing abuses of the industrialists, meanwhile, drove the westward expansion and the policy of manifest destiny. The civil war, then, centralized power in the hands of the federal government, thus providing power to the policies of manifest destiny, and driving an imperial attitude among our leaders.

With the imperial attitude came the need in our leaders' hearts to be the ruler of the world, from Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet", to our presence in WWI and WWII.

Now, our sending our boys off to WWII proved to be a different kind of downfall. With all the young men and women in love, probably going to get married in 5 years anyhow, the news of going off to war resulted in the baby boom, and a lot of premarital sex, or shotgun-fast weddings. Now, in general their intentions were right, and even where girls did get pregnant out of marriage, they still did get married. But then when it came time to teach their kids morality, they couldn't do it. They couldn't bring themselves to say "what we did was wrong" to themselves -- and therefore, they by and large taught their kids "just don't do it. People don't do that kind of thing."

The kids grew up hearing this, and immediately deduced "what kind of hypocrisy is this?!?" So we had the sexual revolution, and alongside that an explosion in psychoactive drugs.

The sexual revolution is something we never really go over. It resulted dually in a general loss of faith in God and libertine attitudes, which brought a host of problems: extreme wrongful profiteering became normal; legalized theft reached new highs with lawsuits becoming an accepted way to become rich. Our television started deifying consumerism and sexuality; and we as we started importing the products of theft, we had to export corruption and death in unimaginably large numbers of ways.

That, since then, has driven a great hatred of the ugly American. (But not to be Eurocentric, France and Germany, even Italy and Spain, all have engendered similar hatred, but not to the extremes that America has.)

But the lack of faith in God also drives fear. So you have 300 million (or more) fear-driven, consumerist, theft-friendly Americans.

What, exactly, could be more natural than the music piracy, the RIAA/MPAA tactics, DRM, and the Patriot act?

Yeah, you can take it back to the 3/5 compromise.

But that's the short sighted answer. The long-sighted answer would take it back to the first humans.

Or maybe, the longest-sighted answer of all would be to say "since we played our own role in this, we have earned what we got."

what is so great about this? these guys -
MARC make sensors in your bed that measure your pulse and breathing rythm and these are completlely invisible.. Whats the big deal with the sofa? And why is this simple thing on cnn?

Other people "get it". If you go to UVA, you might want to talk with Dr. McCalpin, and take a look at the stream memory benchmark.

Memory bandwidth is a bottleneck, not the biggest. It depends on the application. Sometimes an app is CPU bound, disk bound, network bound, or memory bound (or graphics card bound if 130FPS is too slow for your eyes). Also, chip-to-chip interconnects will not change the memory bandidth issue, because if the data does not fit on the chips or thier cache, then its going in memory.

Also, this is for scaling. Think beowulf. For those machines, the data must go from the cpu -> memory -> network interface -> switch -> network interface -> memory -> cpu. Yes, bandiwidth is an issue, but there is also latency, which would be very low with these kinds of chips.

A side note, I work with a guy that soldered chips together like this which had native parallel processing instructions about 20 years ago.

Wrong again. The Windy City is called such because of the 1893 World's Fair. Chicago had to do quite a bit of bragging to bring the fair to their city.

As long as they put it on Legion, U.Va. will get to maintain state bragging rights. I don't keep up with the football rivalry, but this is much cooler anyway.

To disable Messenger in XP Pro:

Click Start->Settings ->Control Panel
Click Administrative Tools
Click Services
Double click Services
Scroll down and highlight "Messenger"
Right-click the highlighted line and choose Properties.
Click the STOP button.
Select Disable or Manual in the Startup Type scroll bar
Click OK

How to Disable Windows Messenger Service

How typical of someone who works in defense- you haven't the slightest idea what goes on anywhere except in your little world.

Remember the destroyer that had to be towed into port because its Windows network crashed and it was dead in the water, because someone entered a 'zero' into a database field, and windows shit the bed? Yeah, the mission-critical functions of a nuclear powered destroyer aren't very important.

Register article about land-attack destroyer
Carrier with windows network(including a joke prediction about how the USS Ronald Regan be running SP2).
Report about the USS Yorktown

They insist Windows NT wasn't the cause of the problems, but the funny thing is, no non-Windows-NT/2k powered 'smart' ship has these problems. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and crashes like a duck...:-)

While NT may not have been the direct cause, the problem propagated(which is typical of windows systems), and never should have happened in the first place- even on crappy programming by an application developer, the DB and OS should not shit the bed because you have a zero in a field.

According to the register articles, Microsoft Federal Systems is now actively engaged in weapons systems integration, not just propulsion and shipboard operations. That is truly frightening...

... here's a litt bit about making those crazy lightshows from the sixties.

f the patent covers "mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object" then does OLE also infringe?

Is there really no prior art?

It's a long time since I used it, and in a LISP environment, of course, there's really nos such concept as a plugin, but there was analogous functionality in NoteCards.

"There are a number of different node types (over forty), supporting various media. Authors may use LISP commands to customize or create entirely new node types."

I would have thought a NoteCards node type was highly analogous to a mime type, and the 'LISP command' was highly analogous to a plugin.

Not exactly comforting, if you ask me! I expect air traffic controllers to know their systems and how to use them.

Then obviously you haven't been following the news. Remember the PATCO debacle? Guess what? We could be seeing another round of the who-needs-experienced-ATCs? game.

Yes, the actual question is key!

So's the method. I love it how the media expects the public to swallow data as fact without even pretending to tell us where it came from. The poll was taken by the Entertainment Software Association using an unnamed method. I have to wonder if it was taken over the Web.

It'd sure be to the pollsters' advantage to have a data set showing that lots of women play computer games. That's been one of their most challenging markets to penetrate. They may be using the 'social proof' method of persuasion here. The more your target audience believes that they'd be part of a trend by doing something, the more they're likely to try it. Sure, I can see them picking an unreliable polling method and hoping for lots of guys to say they're women just for fun.

Disclaimer: I'm a 44 year old woman who played a lot of Morrowind this spring...

I say it's about time and what about hydrogen powered vehicles? Two things that annoy me are filling the gas tank and changing light bulbs. It's time we did alot less of both."

Now if I could just code a portable networkable class library to RTFA-ing robot on my behalf, that would be a triple crown.

Yeah. And let's automate interactivity too. And impressing the neighbors. We could make a waste-o-mataton to make this obsolete. Yeah. Start with a stoker furnace, and put piles of cash on the feed conveyer with a web cam catching it all, and subvert google with an army of hired bloggers to link to it. Sound like a winner?

Hmm. That's too labor intensive. I think I have a better idea: Create a virus that uses a DDoT (distributed denial of thriftiness) strategy. Anyway, whatever you do, just make sure to consider if Homer Simpson could afford to do it and if so, then never do it where people can see you.

Men often oppose a thing, merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike. But if they have been consulted, and have happened to disapprove, opposition then becomes, in their estimation, an indispensable duty of self-love. They seem to think themselves bound in honor, and by all the motives of personal infallibility, to defeat the success of what has been resolved upon contrary to their sentiments. Men of upright, benevolent tempers have too many opportunities of remarking, with horror, to what desperate lengths this disposition is sometimes carried, and how often the great interests of society are sacrificed to the vanity, to the conceit, and to the obstinacy of individuals, who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting to mankind. Perhaps the question now before the public may, in its consequences, afford melancholy proofs of the effects of this despicable frailty, or rather detestable vice, in the human character.

It's perhaps an old urban legend that William Shakespear (spelled here without the terminal 'e', both spellings seem to be around) was consulted on the poetry of the Psalms. Presented as evidence:

Note that 4+6 = 10, the number of letters in Shakespear. Count to the 46th word from the beginning, you see "shake" and the 46th word from the end (excluding the "Selah", a musician notation, IIRC) you have "spear"...

I'd love to find out if the Bard really did have a hand in it... which one might hope this book would...

to be honest, i don't understand the motivation for using vc++ in a non-professional (read: outside of work) capacity in the first place. i realize the $99-$129 "professional version" price tag that i've seen, and the even cheaper academic pricing, are not too shabby compared with "enterprise" pricing... but they're still more expensive than $0! there are more than several freely available alternative compilers for win32 machines - cygwin gcc, borland (debugger also), djgpp, open watcom, lcc, MinGW, and Digital Mars (nb: haven't examined the license in detail) to name a few. can anyone else shed some light on why a developer might prefer vc++, or under which circumstances vc++ might be considered a clear-cut better choice than one of the alternatives listed above?

Dijkstra was half joking, trolling even, in that remark about Basic. In the same piece are other hyperbolic comments such as "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence." Have you really read any Dijkstra? He always seems level headed to me. Your rant seems to be about a different kind of person entirely. Are you seriously suggesting he should have been defending the status quo of Basic (and Fortran and Cobol)? That Basic is effective? If someone tells you goto is harmful, by all means try it out yourself, but also go and read the careful reasoning behind that little quote.

Early reports indicate that every cruise missile hit its intended targets except for one that leveled a Stuckey's in deepest, darkest New Jersey.

"It was something else," said Garden State resident Bibby O'Leary. "There were nutty cheese balls everywhere. May the gracious Lord grant me my wish to never look upon such a sight again."

"We gave the stinking pig-dogs a chance with the National Do Not Fucking Bother Me Resolution," said al-Sahaf. "We gave them every chance, but their black little souls were full of evil, and they had to be taught a lesson.

"Gurgle! Argh!" shouted American Teleservices Association executive director Tim Searcy from his hospital bed where he was being treated for extensive limb loss. "Millions of grandmothers will die for lack of employment, and rats will devour the children of the land! Telemarketing is the only thing keeping the cloven hooved man-goat at bay in his underworld!"

"There is ample legal precedent for governmental interest in protecting residential privacy," said FCC spokesbabe Bubbles McConnifer. "If those cock-gobbling leeches at the ATA don't like it, we can add them to the list of known terrorist organizations, and tip off the MPAA that the ATA is involved in heavy file sharing. Let's see how those weasels like that."

Related link:

Amateur photo of ATA headquarters.

Of course part of the reason for this is that the seventies and early-eighties were an incredibly creative and productive period for software ideas. But... why has it stopped? The successful open source operating systems - the BSDs, Linux, the Hurd - are all based on UN*X, based on paradigms about how people use and share information which are rigid and hierarchical.

Of course there are open source operating systems based on other ideas, but so far none of them is making any break through. Is there a radically different Open Source operating system that you, personally, are excited by? If not, why not? Have we learned nothing in the last thirty years?

AD/HD is in the DSM IV. I can't speak of anywhere else, but in Michigan no treatment can begin without: 1) An exam from a doctor (a general practitioner) 2) An exam from a psychologist. 3) An exam from an educational specialist. Good news is ritilan is no longer the drug of choice for treatment. The bad news is if the parent of the child is rich, steps 1, 2, and 3 are meaningless and the child probably will still be put on unnecessary treatment.

• Entry level models are sub-$1000
  
• 3.07 lbs
  
• Bigger disk in the higher-end models
  
• No integrated cdrw - buy an aftermarket one if you need one for the road
  
• Yeah, outdated Pentium 3 technology. Read the reviews - it beats some of the castrated P4 notebooks you see (ok but not the P4M a.k.a. Centrino minus the wifi)
  
• Bad-ass extended battery for 7 hours claimed life
  
• Compact-flash slot integrated ... kinda neat
  

• 1 Ghz Transmeta chip (go rooting for the underdog)
  
• Nifty sync-up thingy for another pc if this is not your main one
  
• All the wifi goodies
  
• $1500 or so
  
• Probably runs Linux too
  

Sorry for another reply to my own post, but here's a great resource for seeing how the language has changed over time. It has .wav readings of beowulf. The reason I keep citing beowulf (no, I don't have some computer-cluster fetish) is that it is basically the only surviving example of old-english, or so I was taught. If you listen to it, you can really see how in just 1200 years, the language has totally changed.

Some people will happily ignore reasonable explanations and cling desperately to their paranoid delusion. These people cannot be convinced otherwise. Rather they need to be brain-washed to get that stupid idea out of their head.

That's why I fully place my trust in governments and corporations to tell me what's healthy and what's not.

After all, everyone knows that smoking is good for you. And there's no danger in mining uranium or genetically modified food or syphillis treatments or the drinking water, etc.

Yep, if a big organization says it's safe, that's good enough for me.

W

So basically they offer a service like lclint only many times more advanced ? What is to say they haven't missed anything?

This is probably a publicity stunt for them although a good one. I think it would be a good idea for them to sell software suites of their product if they don't already.

The technical term is "the brown noise". :-)

I think what you meant was brownian motion.

Can you expand on this? I've never heard of this, and I can't think of anything in my 40+ years of layman's reading on physics that could be expressed this way.

It's a well-known effect in General Relativity (well, to General Relativists!) and it is called the gravitational redshift effect. In fact, GPS software has to take in effect the gravitational time dilation of radio photons 'falling' from the satellites to the receivers, amongst some other relativistic corrections, in order to get a triangulation down to a few meters.

Sorry if I've borked up the details, haven't had coffee yet!

Dr. Fish

how to migrate comic books from print to web and make it work

I used to read comic books. I still do on occasion, as well as comics on the web. I notice one thing : comics that work well on the web are shorter, simpler in drawing and text and quicker-paced than paper comics. In short, web comics have their own style, quite distinguishable from paper comics. I reckon that's merely due to current screen resolutions : 75dpi, even 100 dpi isn't much to display nice graphics, complex actions or texts, while paper can bear (near-)infinitely complex details.

Once, I started to scan my old paper copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus, which is my all-time favorite comic, because the poor book was getting worn out and I wanted to preserve it. Well, after 2 or 3 pages, the digital result turned out to be awful and I reckon took away much of the atmosphere of the book, so I gave up and ended up buying another, recent hardback.

So is it such a good idea to migrate printed comics to the web ? I'm not that sure. It would certainly give an idea of what the original work is, but I think many comics deserve to be read on the media they were designed for originally. Maybe web comics could be considered as a wholly separate subform of comics in general, with its own style and talented authors ?

Finally, as a side note, there's another reason to prefer printed comics over web ones : have you noticed, on cheap comics, that sometimes you can see through the paper and have a look at what's on the next page, in reverse ? if that next page is colorful, or packed in action, you can see something's going to happen in the story and it makes you anticipate the rest with great pleasure. Web-based comics don't do that, and in a way that can take some of the reading experience away.

...another medium (comic books) that is often dismissed by the "Fine Art" community.

That is simply not true. Take a look at Maus by Art Spiegelman which has received much recognition by the "Fine Art" community.

Here are the two images side-by-side, Akamai's and Thinksecret's.

The images have quite different "feels". I'll leave speculation about the provenance of Thinksecret's image to the experts.

Apparently, some enterprising young soul traced down the Akamai image and as of 20 June 2003, 9:00 am EST, that image is still up. Basically, this means the image is real enough to have Akamai's machines serve it up. (Akamai provides content delivery services to Apple)

And in case someone at Apple and Akamai wake up enough to pull the Akamai content, here's my mirror. Think of it as education free use.

(Dear, Mr. Jobs. Please don't sic your lawyers on me. You'll find I'm very amenable were I to receive "assistance" with my imminent alBook purchase.) ;-)

Using this data, calculating the cost per day at $0.50 per person arrives at the amount of ~$89,277,450.00. The Apollo program ended in 1972 and began officially (I believe) in 1961, making it eleven years long.

365 days x 11 years = 4015 days.
4015 days x $89,277,450 = $358,448,961,750 (1960 value).

This is about as far as I can take the calculation, considering that I am not an economics major. Can anyone calculate the cost of the Apollo project in terms of y2000 value?

I'd be interested to see how much it cost in today's terms.

Google came up with
this page at.

It has a broken link to a longer article maybe? But still, I'd like to see some decent argument to support this rather bold claim. BASIC didn't have decent subroutines or objects, but it could get you down the road of starting to think about wehat you wanted to get done in a step by step fashion, and I think a lot of current great programmers cut their teeth on various versions of the language.

I've certainly seen more crap in "good" languages-- from folks who started in those languages! - then from people who have a long career that started in BASIC.

Here's a few more links :

The history of :
hereand
here

And introduction to
here

Glad I could be of help.

Lactose intolerance is the norm in many parts of the world.

Peta should be advocating the fact that animals are sentient beings, not a renewable resource. And for those pathetic scientists who even created such a device should deserve death at the least, using their own stupid machines.

Where did you use the "=" sign there? You said scientists who create a technology should be put to death "at the least" (I'm wondering what your "most" would be...). You did not say the users of the machines should be put to death, you said the creators. That's like suing Ford for a drunk driver killing your relative. (Pssst... it's not equal.)

I didn't insult your education, call you a fool, or discuss your drug use or lack thereof. I merely said you were being hypocritical, and you didn't answer my question: do you eat vegetables for which you must kill the organism in order to produce the food? (Carrots, potatoes, beets?)

Unlike animals, if an apple is broken off the tree, first, it doesn't feel pain (no nervous system) and second, it can REGROW the apple i.e. regenerate.

But carrots, potatoes and beets cannot regenerate; you kill them by harvesting them.

And just because a plant doesn't have a nervous system doesn't mean that you're not removing a life force from the Earth when you kill plants. They have a Kirlian aura which you're snuffing out. And check out PEVA, who argue that plants and even single-celled organisms can feel pain ("Some single cell organisms are known to react and withdraw (run!) from heat. Is this not a single-cell pain reaction without a complex human-like nervous system? How can a single cell make this determination without having a 'brain'?")

Oh, and as for religious references? Let's take Genesis:

"26": And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Now, from Dictionary.com, dominion is:

1. Sovereign or supreme authority; the power of governing and controlling; independent right of possession, use, and control; sovereignty; supremacy.

Combining the two: God gave us supremacy over the animals. The power to govern, control, possess, and use them for our purposes.

And if you follow a more scientific track, we evolved as omnivores and the few people who I have seen attempt a vegan lifestyle ended up emaciated, weak, pale, and short. (Yes, this is anecdotal evidence.)

I'm not trying to pick a fight -- but you obviously are, given the wording in the great-grandparent post:

Go ahead, FLAME ME. But it's the truth.

>On another topic, throwing around derogatory comments like "desert cult" do nothing to pursuade us, only to get brownie points for yourself with like minded slashdotters.

I agree. There's no excuse for BS like that...

>And the atheist says "what's not good about me? I'm good enough that I don't need God".

Some may say that. Some have simply decided that they feel the bible is far too inconsistent to base one's most important life decisions on. Just because you've rejected religion _doesn't_ automatically mean you've rejected the possibility of doing wrong.

IMHO, bad choices are made by a lack of intelligence on the matter at hand, and since nobody knows everything, and nobody ever will (unless someone builds a time machine + transporter), no atheist should ever think themselves perfect.

>I'd be curious to see just exactly what it is an atheist could possibly believe they are "good enough" at so that they don't need God.

Simple -- I feel I'm "good enough" at making decisions that affect others positively, while also ensuring the effect on myself is either neutral, or positive.

Sure, I make mistakes, but up to now, none serious enough to alienate family, friends I wanted to keep, or neighbours. I think that's a good enough track record, IMHO, without asking "God" to tell me what I should(n't) do.

>After all, without God there is no right or wrong - there is only "something that helps me pass on my seed" and "something that stops me passing on my seed".

Of _course_ there's right and wrong. What's right is what causes humanity to progress in a positive manner, so that any children you have might prosper, and so that your name will be remembered in a good light. Generally, this happns by improving humanity as a whole, which means not doing things to harm it (ie: Hurting other people).

I'd rather that if someone hundreds of years from now crosses my obit. they weren't saying "Look, it's shepd the Tryrant!".

>The fact that atheists come by a set of moral laws independently of religion is a testimony to God's existence and a mockery of what the atheist believes.

Say what? That doesn't compute. If group a produces set b independently of group c, which produces the same set b, it is automatically group c that produced set b?

Which brings me to what I said earlier, and why I don't believe in the bible. Inconsistencies in logic abound.

As an interesting test, you'll find that many animals, despite the fact that such lower life forms cannot understand the mere conception of a "God", do have feelings, many of which seem quite human. Harm an animal and it'll either get enraged or cower. Befriend it and it won't harm you (usually). It may even help you.

The fact that animals can have these simple feelings says something about the fact that humans could be pre-programmed with a set of moral rules from birth. And the fact that the human brain is so large and so much more complex than that of any other species would clearly point to a much more developed and complex rule system. One that helps govern an orderly society, perhaps?

>If natural selection sets any precedence, then almost every atheist I view is not living the way they should.

As an appeal to the bible reader in you, Matthew 7:1 suggests that you might want to avoid this...

>They should all be living in ways that helps them get more children - what path they choose is irrelevant (being nice, deceptive, violent, etc). What is important is producing as many children as possible.

Tell that to the gay atheists, would you?

Then again, by this "Atheism's goal is reproduction" logic, that can't happen, can it? There can be no gay Atheists in in a Fox's Hole. Then again, the

When did the word Christian become a bad word? If you want to belittle Christianity you should at least read the Gospel, and if you read just the book of John (which you could read in 15 minutes), I think you would not think of Christianity in the same light.

But if I were you, I'd be more worried about the small stuff.

A larger version.

Or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or my favourite: this one.

Artists seem to like to portray asteroids as being sveral hundred kilometres in size.

There is no ether!

History . Learn it or repeat it.

I think he was referring to the subjunctive mood. You know, if I were someone with a life, I wouldn't be on /.

hum, are you serious or not? the hubble sphere depends on us being in the centre of a sphere, but it doesn't really mean anythinng really, if You went to mars your hubble sphere's centre would be on mars, etc, etc. It's all about that after a certain distance you cannot see any further and that is true in all directions, hence a sphere. Heck, each one of us little critters on this planet got our own hubble sphere!
please read

-jdm

The incident before the civil war was famous because it showed the tension between the north and south. Senator Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts, was caned by representative Preston Brooks, Democrat of South Carolina, in 1856 for insulting Senator Andrew Butler's stance on Kansas (and making light of his medical condition). Brooks was Butler's nephew and caned Sumner at his desk in a nearly empty Senate chamber. So, as legislation it didn't really work because they were from different chambers. As propaganda it worked pretty well, but for Sumner and the abolitionists.

I think the first 'caning' in congress was in 1798. You can read about it here.

Yes. BASIC is the language which inspired this famous quote:

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

-- Edsger Dijkstra, " How do we tell truths that might hurt?"

Actually, they have made significant strides already in figuring out how the brain works. Check out the Levy Lab at the University of Virginia. They've trained a computer model of a rat's hippocampus to do all sorts of intelligent things, such as transitive inference, sequence completion/combination/disambiguatuion, goal finding, etc. While these are not difficult problems for humans to solve or hardcode into a program, the fact that a single network can do these different and sometimes contradictory things represents something that I would call intelligence. As far as I know, they don't plan on having a model of a human brain very soon, since U.Va. lacks NSA-scale compute servers, but even rat-level learning is pretty cool.

It is pretty dark and wet in the small intestine as well and these seem to work there. Perhaps it would help you out if you flushed one of these down the toilet and picked it up at the waste treament plan several hours later where you can get pictures of it's journey.

Of course it is possible that the account name was stolen or sold; I get a lot of MSN messenger spam on the new XP Machine, mostly from blockmessenger.com

Dude, you do know you can just disable the messenger service, right?